hey welcome back to los angeles lisa martin here with the cube we are live at kubecon and cloudnativecon 21. it's been great to be here we've been broadcasting the last couple of days about 2 700 people joining us in person great buzz great energy i've got two guests here next joining me remotely please welcome it's reich the vp technologist at dell emc anivis iyer senior principal product manager at dell technologies gentlemen welcome to the program thanks for having us lisa thank you lisa and we're pleased that you're joining us today it's like let's go ahead and start with you let's talk we've seen a lot of of uptick and kubernetes it's been picking up a lot what are some of the things that you're seeing through your lens right that's a great question lisa so really we need to take a step back bobby into 2019 we just mentioned in-person conferences so back then we started to see a slow adoption of customers that are starting to play with kubernetes in their test environment maybe running some pocs but then the pandemic happened obviously and we started to see huge explosion in terms of adoption and accelerating the digital based projects for our customers so they're really starting to pick up kubernetes and use it heavily in their production and of course in addition to their test and dev environments as well and because of that adoption they started to think about other scenarios and other considerations that are relevant for their production environment which is based upon kubernetes things like disaster recovery availability all of those things that typically you don't worry about when you just run them in a small desk or a poc environment but are super critical for our customers and you know it's the largest storage company in the world we have the smallest company customers in the world but also the largest and the most demanding one it's a really huge adoption that needs to basically accelerate all of those aspects that belong to an enterprise environment that happens to run on kubernetes itself if ask do you see something similar yeah absolutely i agree with itzik and actually one of the brief stories actually i start out with is because a few years ago actually several years ago when i was taking a cab in new york remember the point-of-sale terminal was not working so you know you took my credit card just like use the magnetic spike so not having the technology access was like an inconvenience but it still could transact but now today's age when you look at digital transform trans digitally transformed companies starting with all these web companies like you know you've got like uber lyft and things like that but then you also have mainstream companies where the entire business is now taking over digital hence all these applications are the ones that are powering the entire business if you will and not having these applications available or these apps available uh will basically the business is gonna lose money and and that's and that's what is and the pandemic has only accelerated digital transformation right because everyone working from home and and also the customers are also remote so now you have the entire operation is just software is running the business pretty much every company is a technology company and then you have you know and then all these applications they are modernized so they are modernized in the way that they're not built to the traditional architectures they're now using you know microservices devops and agile these are three major aspects that kind of you know drove the new application modernized applications to build more complex applications and kubernetes has emerged as the sole platform that can you know kind of serve the underlying platform between all of these aspects and hence we see that you know kubernetes adoption has taken off a lot because pretty much every organization is running several projects within the enterprise including app modernization you know transformation of any kind of secondary kind of use cases iot you know the whole digital transformation story is kind of running on kubernetes and as sick was pointing out so now kubernetes are simmered as the key infrastructure as a service layer if you will or above the infrastructure service and it needs to consume storage and it needs to have you know all these traditional capabilities that were for uh for applications right i mean like uh disaster recovery uh having enterprise grade uh availability aspects like you know for this uh data protection things like that and that's sort of is and the enterprise capabilities are relatively i would say uh accelerating a lot earlier kubernetes was more on the non-enterprise aspects of the journey now we are seeing a lot more enterprise growth are you seeing your conversations within organizations elevate up the chain where kubernetes is concerned is this a c-level conversation or the understanding that from a competitive differentiation perspective from a modernization perspective it's the direction they need to go in yeah absolutely and for them you know vmware ran itself a couple of months ago about the reasons that are important for customers to run containers in production there were like ten tens of them but the number one reason is to accelerate software adoption and to basically write codes faster that's like the number one reason it's not about the technology itself you know technology is just an enabler and the enabler is to write the code as quickly as you could deploy it in test and dev quickly as you could run some qa cycles on it and release release release the code that's at the end of the day that's the main difference between the old way of the waterfall approach to the new way of agile approach which eventually got translated into the infrastructure layer itself it needs to accommodate those changes if you will well releasing code faster is going to enable organizations presumably in any industry to be able to develop and release products and services faster to the demanding consumer market i imagine that's absolutely correct we've all got spoiled by the smartphone industry we'll just expect a new version to be just deployed to your device almost every day now it's exactly the same it is we i think we carry that i think it's i think it's impossible not to carry that consumer expectation from our consumer life into our business life and we just expect that things are going to work that way because in our consumer lives they do i want to ask you guys about is that this question is directly for you talk to me about csi what is it besides a tv show i know you have a great answer for this and many spin-offs by the way right not just a single one csi right so let's take a step back into 2015. docker rebecca dockercon they sit on the stage and during the keynote and they explain that you should write your code in the 12 factor way resiliency should be built in into the containers themselves and you shouldn't care about storage persistency now we're in the storage industry for the best part of my life right now and storage persistence is important if a customer lose data that's a very bad day for the customer and possibly a very bad day for me as well so it's all about the data nothing else really matters the data itself is the goal and so there was no data persistency back then you go here and we actually work with the startup that did just storage consistency for containers basically meaning the ability to provision a volume from storage array into kubernetes and kubernetes will know about this that style tab went busted but the need still existed and so into that need google came and they come up with this api called container storage interface short for csi that does exactly that it allows kubernetes administrator of the kubernetes api to consume storage from the underlying storage array so provision volumes map mapping volumes taking a snapshot of the volume and mapping those from those very basic capabilities now those capabilities are very basic and we now have customers that are telling us i need far more than just the ability to provision a volume for my kubernetes environments i need this volume to be protected i need this volume to be replicated and it is volume to be protected into a backup device all of those things that csi doesn't know to do today no we didn't know to do in the near future so what we did is we said right we're not going to reinvent the wheel that's csi we're not just going to repeat csi all over again we're going to extend csi with open source tools that will enable our customers to do all of those things that are just mentioned before so csm is container storage modules which is what we announced today and it's very high level it provides you i provided the capabilities to do the following the first one is the observability module so if you're monitoring your open source environments you are very very likely to use open source tools like graphing and commit use so we have this plugin that allows you to monitor your storage array with gofundme and prometus and really uh becomes the liaison point between the storage admin the kubernetes admin they can connect both to the console and each really understand the the entity that is not aware of i call it the two-way mirror base second module is the resiliency module kubernetes is very infant in terms of understanding storage it doesn't understand storage failure conditions and so our resiliency module run as the k3s is like a minimum version of kubernetes if you will which keeps monitoring both the storage array and the host and in case of a storage arrow it knows to act upon it and do things like volume unmapping and map those volumes to other surviving servers in the product center etc the other module is the replication module so back into 2015 uh customers are basically telling us today i want to use kubernetes but i also want to replicate the data to either a passive site or an active site and in case of a failure if my primary site goes down i want to fail over this kubernetes volumes and data to a remote site so literally within a click of a button you can fail over your kubernetes environment from site a to site b using the underlying storage array capabilities replication etc etc and the other module that we've also announced is the volume group snapshots so instead of just taking a single volume which is what csr is all about you can actually take multiple volume that belong to multiple micro services that at the end of the day running within those containers in order to really back up a service and not just the micro service itself so all of these modules and future modules that will come in the future as well belong to csm and csm for us is just the beginning it's everything that our most most the demanding customers want us to provide today and they are not willing to wait for csi to catch up base got it so we you've done a great job of explaining what csi is what it isn't what csm is and all the great things that were announced today let's talk about the data protection the security angle we've seen so much change in the security the threat landscape in the last 18 months we've seen ransomware become a household word the proliferation of ddos attacks and of course there's this scattered workforce that is still scattered talk to me about why data protection for kubernetes and what are some of the unique needs that that presents uh sure uh thanks lisa so um so when you look at the kubernetes landscape it originally started out with mostly the front-end aspects multi like you know like web tier type applications but as the landscape has evolved now we are seeing actually in the kubernetes community also there has been newer concepts like stateful sets for example which allows you to have more persistent type uh or basically they you know the application that have retained state and data uh in the kubernetes cluster and we are seeing a huge proliferation and that is also increasing you know across the board on uh for example everything from experimentation or like any kind of user experience kind of data the understanding about sessions you know what users like what they don't like to all critical operational aspects to transactional elements too all of them being brought into the kubernetes we are seeing organizations in various stages of the journey and then add on to the additional uh capabilities on the storage side as she was mentioning about csi and csm and are basically the ways for the kubernetes layer to consume these storage services so when you're building these modern applications uh the state is now preserved as part of the kubernetes and actually recently we had a case with one of the customers we've had and uh so they did not have data protection as part of their kubernetes and uh and you know and we are seeing this in several organizations where you have an it ops kind of a team and there is a devops team there's a two-speed it concept so devops teams a lot of time they do not take into consideration a lot of these uh you know disaster recovery and uh you know the data protection aspects as part of the design and then one of the customers just what happened and they lost you know data because the you know their systems crashed and it was not through ransomware luckily but it was through uh you know a general logical you know failure of hardware things like that and so they could not recover that so they had to go back and they had to like rest all the whole thing so they started investing in saying oh we need a ways to protect the data so that i can recover so data is all about recovery it's about you know making sure you can record to a certain point in time and also recovering in the minimal amount of time and the challenges that kubernetes adds on top of traditional application that you know the entire application definition in kubernetes is split across multiple of these smaller metadata aspects like the application itself will have labels they will have uh you know they'll have secrets they'll have config maps they'll have custom resource definitions they have all this additional metadata that make up the entire application not just the data so you need to have all of that captured in context in a cloud native fashion if you if you're trying to protect that kubernetes environment and that's kind of a little bit of a unique challenge and then from a security aspect that you alluded to from kubernetes yes there are been you know multiple security challenges that we see although we don't directly work on the front end on the uh on the prevention side but on the cure side data protection is an important aspect right i mean if you look at the open source community there is so much open source today and how do you know that the open source and the api that you're consuming is is coming from a valid source you need so there is all kinds of like different security solutions that kubernetes community offers to validate making sure the source code is good the apis are authenticated and you know authorized things like that so there is a lot of these but even despite that you know there is always ability for some attacks to sneak in and that's where data protection is providing that cure so in case something does happen and you have a ransomware attack i have a cyber security vault or i have data stored in a secure fashion in a panic room if you will that i can so my business like i was alluding to my earlier example the business depends on that data and that operational transactional customer data and you need to recover that and you need to store it in a secure place and that's sort of the whole aspect of that it's got to be recoverable that's the whole point guys thank you so much for joining me talking to me about what you're seeing from a kubernetes adoption acceleration perspective thank you for helping me learn a new definition of csi not a show or a spin-off and talk to us about what csm is and the things that you are the modules that you're announcing today we appreciate your candor and your time thank you lisa thanks for having us my pleasure for my guests i'm lisa martin coming to you live from los angeles at kubecon cloudbanditcon21 be right back dave nicholson will rejoin me with our next guest stay tuned you

>> Voiceover: From New York, it's theCUBE, covering Blockchain Week. Now, here's John Furrier. >> Hello and welcome to exclusive CUBE coverage here in New York City for Blockchain Week, NY Blockchain Week New York City. CUBE's coverage continues with cryptocurrency, decentralized internet, the applications of blockchain. Our next guest is Richard Rofe, who's the co-found partner of Arcadia Crypto Ventures. Welcome to this CUBE conversation. >> Thanks, good to be here. >> So when you're in that neck of the woods, New York City, obviously Wall Street, you know, they traded across the wall in the old days, and then it became now the Wall Street, it's changing. We're seeing crypto and token economics really driving the entrepreneurial energy, both on start-ups, as well as in the capital market. And you guys are on the front end of that, with some awesome investments advisory. And what's the craze all about? I mean, you have more practical view, your firm, conservative and also aggressive. What's your take? >> Well, first off, I'm a little older than most of the guys in the space, so I have a different perspective. I did come from Wall Street prior to this, I ran a hedge fund for 12 years, and before that I was basically an entrepreneur my whole life, software and other things. So, I looked at this a little differently, than probably some of the younger guys do. I've kind of seen this before? I think I saw it with the internet. And I think it's a world-changing shift, and we're an early part of it. We've been in for a while, actually in this space forever. Cause, you know, this space isn't that old. So, six years out of 10, we've been in it from the beginning, basically. >> You know, us old guys look at the waves, these waves of innovation, we're like hanging ten on the old big surfboards, and the young kids are ninjaing up on the small board. What is the younger generation looking at? Cause they're certainly, I wish I was 20-something, this is the best wave I've seen in tech revolution coming, all the ingredients are there, the capital markets are changing radically, the technology product market is changing radically, the global landscape's changing radically, the regulatory landscape, and everything else, is a perfect storm for innovation. >> Rapid change, I got involved early around 2012, just to give you a, you know, since we're at a conference this week, and see how crowded and incredibly busy it is, takes up an entire giant hotel, and bursting into the street, when I, in 2012 when I went to the very first conference, that I attended anyway, you could fill a small room with every single person at the conference. So the growth has been insane. It is driven by younger people, but the beauty of this is it's driven by people all over the world. This is not just an American thing. This is a worldwide thing. This is a shift, a technology shift that I don't think we've seen since basically the advent of the internet itself. >> You know, there's an old expression, both sides of the table, you've been an entrepreneur, you've been an investor. A hedge fund is almost the third side of the table, it's like 3D chess almost, you are now playing in the crypto world. Being an entrepreneur, you've been there, done that, hedge fund you had to run money and make great investments. Now, with this new crypto phase, how are you looking at it? Because you have the experience, you can see the growth in the younger generation, new disruptive people literally just flying blind, just going crazy with some good stuff. How are you managing that? How do you look at the marketplace, how do you make your bets? >> Good question. It's difficult. First of all, the barrier to entry is low. At this time, anyone who understands technology is really getting involved, and for good reason, but therefore you have, hundreds and hundreds of deals that come your way on a weekly basis. So you have to really pick and choose through the ones that are interesting. And you apply the same techniques that you applied as an entrepreneur and an investor prior to that, you look at the underlying business, the area that the blockchain will disrupt, change, shift, how it will do it, how long it will last, and how many people will be interested in it. And if you find the ones that are attractive and interesting, then you find the team that's attractive and interesting. That's the big point, is that you really want to have a very good team, you care so much about their background, their technology background, as well as their business background. If you can put those things together, you have a winning investment, and then you try to do it. >> You and I were talking before you came on camera... crowd sales and Kickstarter, Gofundme, as great ways to get capital. But now there's really no liquidity there. Talk about the dynamics because I think, you know, traditional investors in this market say "hmm", and there's so much more coming that'll create more stability obviously. We see some of that, I'll get to that in a second. But I want to get your take on, from an investor standpoint, the notion of liquidity, and also an entrepenuer's standpoint, access to capital. Talk about the dynamics between access to capital and liquidity for the investors and for the entrepreneurs. >> Also great points. I mean, right now, we have something that is giving both things, right? Access to capital, worldwide access to capital, from the smallest investor to the biggest investor, everybody has an opportunity, where before it was really limited, and then you have liquidity in that if you have a token or a coin, that's tradable, whether it's on an exchange, or private trade, you can actually liquidify your investment. Where if you were in a private company in the past, and I've done many of those, you're locked in. You're kind of at the mercy of the organizers of the company, whoever they are, the people that run the business. And you're kind of stuck there, good or bad. In this case, you have the ability to trade in and out, just as you would with a public stock. >> So you can get some liquidity in the front end, while private still, so it's kind of like a little liquidity market. I want you to address a question that's come up, an observation that we've made on theCUBE. We were at the Bahamas at Polycon 18, Puerto Rico. Not in the US, is New York or New York City the capital, you know, of money, that's where money never sleeps, so to speak, Gordon Gekko would say, in the old Wall Street quote. But this is a global phenomenon. We're outside of the United States, there's a lot of action. Let's talk about the role of global money. >> Well, that's part of the excitement of the whole thing. It's not just the United States. It's all over the world, so it's really democratized investing, it's democratized finance, it's changing the landscape completely. And I think that it's unstoppable. I do think that regulation, and I know we talked about that earlier too, is a good thing. I think that regulation is necessary, because you can't just have a rogue environment completely, but on the other hand too much regulation kills things. So there has to be a happy medium and hopefully they'll find that. >> I love the invisible hand strategy, and certainly let capital take, but you want to have some signaling, SSC's been doing that. I just don't think it's stoppable in my opinion. But I want to go shift to where entrepreneurs are looking at the capital markets. Today the choices are bootstrap, friends and family, small sized business, cash flow business if you will, or go venture capital or private equity, if you have the kind of multiples that would warrant that, assuming the sector is in vogue at the moment. Which, you know, always a coin flip. Here, with token economics, there's a huge access to capital. Bubble we're seeing certainly is reflected in that. What are you looking for, when you see that kind of behavior? How do you manage the risk, how are entrepreneurs navigating that world? >> First of all, managing the risk, it's tough obviously. Especially as I mentioned earlier, there's so many deals coming at you at all times, so you have to choose wisely, that's the first way to manage risk. Always was the way to manage risk. People used to ask me in the hedge fund business, how do you manage your risk? Well, I only try to invest in the things that I think have the best upside, and the smallest downside, it was pretty simple. And it's the same here. It comes down to at the end of the day, what businesses are you choosing? The other thing is that, you know, first of all there's inherent risk. You can never get around that fact. But if you really believe in the long-term future, and you're willing to go through some ups and downs, and there are going to be, and there have been, as we know, over the past 10 years, and there will be more in the future. You have to be willing to ride those waves. And if you can do that, then I think your risk will just mitigate over time, as long as you're a smart, wise investor, and of course spreading it around. You don't want to be in, you know, all your eggs in one basket, then you'll take a giant risk. >> Yeah, it's one of those things where you don't want to zig when you should have zagged, with all this going on. It's certainly a turbulent landscape, I've heard phrases like, it's like wet cement, you don't know when it's going to form, all these kinds of phrases. So the question I want to ask you is, what do you look for? What are you looking at, what signals are you trying to synthesize, what's the tea leaves that you're reading, what're you looking at? What's concerning you, what are some tell signs that are going to help you navigate the investment side and advisory side? >> With regard to the entire space, we're looking very much at regulation, we want to know what the regulators want. I'm not sure they know what they want. We speak to them, we keep them pressed on the situation from our end, and we hear back from them on with their thinking. We'd like to see some regulation over time, but it's complicated because they don't even know what they're looking at yet. That's a big part of it. They're not sure how to regulate something that they don't understand. And there are very few people in this space, and this is one of the biggest risks. There are very few people that even do understand it, and are in this maze. >> I was telling an entrepreneur just here today, and then last week, it's in the Bay Area in California, they're more progressive than their suppliers, their law firm, and some of their accounting help. They're more progressive on the front end, they're actually advising the law firm on deals. >> And that has happened, that's happened with us, in fact we've recently put a structure together, where we taught the law firm how to do it, the law firm was impressed with it. They had to go study it, they spent a few weeks, and they came back and said "Hey, this is a great idea, we're going to do this with everybody else going forward." And that basically came from us backwards. >> Did they bill you for those hours, or did you charge them? >> Great question, I really hope not. I'm going to ask my partner if we got billed for anything. >> Rich, I want to ask about blockchain, we got to see Consensus 2018, it's happening here in New York, big event, part of CoinDesk too, they're doing a great job, content program's been solid. It's been super crowded, they need a bigger venue obviously, the demand was high and sold out. And I know there's a lot of side events going on, a lot of activity. What is your take away, what do you look this as saying? Is it like, wow, what's your take on the impact of the momentum? >> Well, first of all, as I mentioned before, I saw this thing with my own eyes, right, from a little tiny room in Las Vegas, was the entire conference, to what we saw today. With people in the streets who can't even get in, thousands and thousands of people in one hotel, which is probably not even cut out for that many. I think it's incredible, the momentum says a lot, by the way, talking about mitigating risk, there's not just so many people, there's so many smart people, that are figuring this out, one by one, and getting involved early. And that really gives me a lot of confidence, in terms of the long-term strategy. If this thing grew by, you know, two or three times, four or five times what I saw in 2012, I would not be nearly as excited. What I'm seeing here, this mass load of people, who are fighting to get into an event, right, into a venue, and the intelligence, and the kind of people they are, and how educated they are, it really gives me hope. And it reminds me, of early days in the internet, where we saw the super smartest people, kind of broke away from the crowd, did their own thing. We saw guys leaving traditional firms, going and starting companies, the Amazons, the Googles, the Facebooks, and things of that nature, which became the largest companies in the world. >> And there were problems there too. You had back-dating stock options, you had all these deals where revenue is revenue, and then accounting issues, but again all that is just a symptom of a growth market. Final question for you, when you look at what you guys are doing, and how you're investing, how you're getting involved in companies, you're also an advisor to Bloq which is having an event here in New York City. How are you navigating the hiring, the partnership, the community aspect, as in the financial community, like the entrepreneurial community, there's a tight-knit bond. How is it evolving, how are you guys shaping that, what are some of the things you can share around the financial community? >> Well, we do advisory work, so we work with a lot of different clients that want to get into the space. We work with some very traditional clients, that are not really technologists, and those are the most interesting ones. They're difficult, because they don't understand a lot of it, and I don't blame them, I come from that world too. So, we have to really hold their hand, and we deal with a lot of very smart tech people who come from a whole other, but don't know the business side so well, so we kind of work with both. In terms of our own hiring, and who we bring on to our company, we really look for a very unique person, which is, usually in this case a younger, because of the space itself, we look for everybody, but we don't find that many people my age and older, that even want to spend time, let alone understand it. >> Some smart kid "I don't want to work at Goldman Sachs, they're old." >> Listen, and again, we saw this in the internet, you could not get a smart kid out of college to get a regular job back in the Nineties. They were all going to Web startups. Kind of same thing here. So we have a great pool to choose from, we try to pick people that are on the cutting-edge, but that also want to work hard. Because, again, it's a start-up industry, right? So, think about the hours, you know, you're really going to put in a lot more than you would at a nine-to-five job. Your weekend, nights, you know, the phone, you're connected 24/7. But the hiring's been, uh, we have a staff of about six people, and I think they're great, but we do hand-pick them and it takes a while. >> Take a minute to explain what you guys do, how many investments you've made, you've been there early, the year 2012 you mentioned, early on. >> I started in 2012 in terms of in just the space itself, due to my friend Matt Roszac at Bloq, who was really early, a year ahead of me there, and he got me involved, but I didn't really start making serious investments. My first investment was in 2014, we invested in a settlement and clearing house company, that's now one of the fastest growing banks in the country, and then we got into some of the coins, and some of the platforms, that's where we invest the most, and a few deals here and there. And then we started to do advisory work, because let's face it, we knew what we were doing, we were ahead of the curve, we certainly understood it, and so many people want to get into something that they don't know, they're going to need someone to hold their hand all the way through. So, our advisory business is our main stable business, and then we invest into certain deals that we think are interesting, a lot of them are platforms. >> Yeah, and token economics is driving all that. Richard, thanks for coming on, appreciate taking the time to come on CUBE, I'm John Furrier, we're here at New York City for Blockchain Week New York, and this is theCUBE exclusively continuing coverage of the cryptocurrency craze, token economics, obviously blockchains enabling technology underneath it, and the whole new Internet infrastructure is transforming with cloud, everything behind it's really exciting. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: Live from Washington, D.C. It's Cube Conversations with John Furrier. (techno music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to our special on the ground presentations, The Cube coverage in Washington, D.C. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGEL, the host of the Cube. We are getting all the stories on what's happening with the innovation and entrepenuership in our societal nonprofits and/or innovation in government. We hear Peter Prix is the OneRelief app founder, onereliefapp.com, OneRelief is your venture. You're part of the PeaceTech Accelerator. We're here at the United States Peace Institute in D.C. Tell us about your opportunity. >> Great pleasure. Yes, my name is Peter, CEO and founder of OneRelief, the OneRelief app. What we do is let people like you and me make quick donations, micro donations to disaster relief aid. So after emergency has struck, Hurricane Maria, last year in September, approaching the Caribbean Islands. We all knew about it, we all saw those pictures on TV. And we all felt empathy and wanted to help and wanted to gift, but there's no easy way. So what we do with the OneRelief web app is we let people like you and me easily, with the click of a button, make quick donations that supports certified disaster relief agencies on the ground. >> And you guys are a start up here at the PeaceTech Accelerator. >> Exactly, we're a startup here at the PeaceTech Accelerator. >> Great, well I'm really bullish and I think crowdsourcing has opened up the democratization of giving, which has been phenomenal. But there's some scale issues, now there's ten zillion apps, certainly GoFundMe, we know about those things. They're kind of peer-to-peer. You know, friend has to socialize with that but you know, a lot of folks are wondering, hey, if I donate to that Haiti situation, or hurricane, where does the money go? We heard in Puerto Rico, half the stuff didn't even get there. This is a big fear, cognitive dissonance from the giver. Do you guys solve that problem? >> Yes, so absolutely. When it comes to giving at the moment you can choose between giving to the big players, the big charities that we don't trust, as we know. Or you can go on a platform like GoFundMe and there's actually 12,000 fundraisers for Hurricane Maria. And you don't know who to trust either. So what we do in OneRelief is we provide a marketplace, a platform that is certifying charities with confirmed people on the ground. And when you make a donation through the platform you actually get an update. You get a status notification, help has been embarked, help has arrived in a community. You get visuals, you get video of what's happening on the ground. And you get feedback at the end of the disaster of what has actually been achieved with the money you've donated. >> So you close in the loop from the giver, from the journey of the money to the destination, and seeing the impact of it. >> Absolutely. From the second you press the donate button and you donate and you share a fundraiser, you can see how the money is getting to the country, how the money's being used, what it's being used for, and what the progress of that is, providing you information on the impact of your donation and closing the loop and encouraging you the next time another disaster happens to donate again. >> Create some reliability. You're essentially verifying the end points of where the cash goes. >> Peter: Absolutely. >> How's it going? How far along are you guys? Sounds like a great idea, I think it's an awesome idea. Getting a little dashboard, seeing the impact, make people feel good, know their money's going to work. How do you get this off the ground? You're in the Accelerator, what's the status? >> Absolutely, we're about three weeks away from the launch of the platform, it will be launched on March 1st, so we are in the final push of getting the app off the ground. We have partners, we have contracts signed with, for example, Action Against Hunger, where agencies that have country offices that have been working in the countries that are very often struck by crises for many many years. So it's not that their money goes to a small charity that we've never heard of and are not able to get any accountability information, but it's going to certified agencies that have people on the ground. >> And they're excited by this, it sounds like. >> Oh they are more than excited. It's changing the entire industry. It's rather than the rich people signing big checks it's people like you and me small donations that have an impact of changing the world. And what the OneRelief app is really special and good at it's the speed at what this happens. So, a disaster strikes, within hours, the fundraiser's online on social media and people can donate. >> And one of the great things about us covering Gov Cloud, we've observed that bringing a modern stack like cloud you can actually radically transform these industries that have technology going in some cases so antiquated they don't know what's running on. >> Oh no, absolutely. So, the platform itself is running on AWS and we use serverless cloud technology that allows us to really scale the platform, whether a thousand people donate or a million people donate at the same time it's running on a serverless cloud. >> So you're providing critical infrastructure services for donations , big or small? >> Absolutely, and it's 100% scalable, which wasn't able a few years ago. >> How is the accelerator helping you, PeaceTech? >> Yeah, a really interesting question in multiple ways, both through mentoring support that we get through the partners that bring incredible support and help us really in getting the platform off the ground. AWS helps helps us with setting it up on lambda, that's wonderful. We have C5 who gives us some really interesting support in how we can operate this as a nonprofit with a tech startup mechanism. We have partners like the PeaceTech Lab that helps us really operate as a nonprofit. >> We've been covering AI for Social Good Intel among other partners. Really kind of look at this, not just as a philanthropy opportunity, real change. But what's interesting to us us we've reported on SiliconANGLE is the societal entrepreneurship market is booming in D.C. Can you comment about what it's like here? I mean, is that right? Obviously Silicon Valley where we live you get a lot of the tech alpha tech guys out there. But here it's like non-profits. What old ways of doing things are now kind of becoming more entrepreneurial because of cloud? What's your reaction to that? >> No, absolutely, I think Washington, D.C. Is the best place for us to be at. It's a mix of government, non-profits, and foundations that come in. There's a lot of, actually a lot of young startups coming up, impact startups. There's lots of coworking spaces. And we can really feel it. This is the most conducive environment for us as a startup to grow and to thrive getting support from partners that we need. >> Societal entrepreneurship as a category, I mean, I don't even know if that's the name of it, what do you call it, is booming. Can you share any anecdotes, is it booming, is it just emerging? What's your thoughts? >> Societal entrepreneurship. Yes, what the OneRelief platform really does, it allows everyone to give. It is enabling every citizen in the world to make a quick donation an amount that every one of us can afford. >> Final question, what's your core challenges as you get through the accelerator, look to go to market, is it the partnerships, is it the tech? What are your core challenges? >> I think it's really clearly communicating how OneRelief is different and how it is not like all the other platforms out there, how we are the one stop shop in a marketplace that is connecting people who want to do good with receiving charities on the ground. >> How do you compare and contrast to say these other crowdsourcing and crowdfunding platforms? >> Yes, on the one hand there's the big players, the big charities that we don't trust, that we want to give directly to because we don't know what happens with the money. And there's peer-to-peer fundraising that we don't trust either because they're tiny and we don't know who's setting up those fundraisers. We are right in between. We are a platform that is connecting the donor with a certified charity. >> How about emerging technologies like blockchain which has been very popular in supply chain-like things, because you're basically an end-to-end supply chain of money moving to the end point, the relief or whatever. >> Peter: Yeah! >> Good use of blockchain? No? Are you thinking about that? >> Oh no, absolutely. We actually have an innovation lab that is only purely looking at blockchain from different angles. One of them is for us to accept crypto donations and to be the first platform on the market that is accepting micro donations in cryptocurrency. And secondly, we are looking at blockchain technology and running a hyperledger project at the moment to see how we can accelerate the speed at how long it takes to get the donation from when a person makes it into the receiving bank account on the ground in country xyz in the world. >> A whole new infrastructure wave is coming, you're seeing it decentralize applications and hardened end-to-end apps like you guys. >> Yeah, no, absolutely. >> Well, congratulations Peter. Thanks for joining me here. This is the Cube Conversation on the ground here in Washington, D.C. where emerging markets and nonprofits and just ventures for good are now the new entrepreneurship craze in Washington, D.C. It's the center of the action and with cloud and modern software and blockchain and things of that nature you can make it happen. Thanks for watching. (techo music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by NetApp. (upbeat techno music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to this special CUBE presentation. We are here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, Nevada for NetApp Insight 2017. I'm John Furrier, your co-host and co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. Here at theCUBE, here with Keith Townsend for all day today. Keith Townsend at CTO Advisor covering NetApp 2017 here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. And before we kickoff a long day of great conversations with thought leaders, experts, executives, and also customers of NetApp who are transitioning to a whole digital world, a digital transformation. We can't not address the massacre that happened only a few days ago here in Las Vegas, here at the Mandalay Bay, our second home of theCUBE. If you know theCUBE, you know that we're here all the time. Hits home for us, but that pales in comparison to the families and victims of the 58 dead, 59 total but 58 that have died plus the shooter. Over 500 injured in the heinous cowardly act from the shooter who killed those people. Really I'm trying to kind of hold it together because it really hits home for me because, like 9/11, it's one of those moments that this is planned. This was a coordinated attack, kind of like the Oklahoma bombing, and it reflects on our society. I want to make a comment. And Keith, I'd like to get your thoughts in a minute. But first I would like to say our hearts and prayers are with the victims and families. And want to put a shout out to the first responders because if you look at the Mandalay Bay and what happened here, there could have been a lot more that have died. And that is really a testament to the people who responded, to this unpredictable act. And our prayers go out to the families and victims. And again, a shout out to the law enforcement people. Keith, this is a tragedy that people are trying to make sense out of it. And you know, we have to move on. Obviously, we're here at the NetApp event. A lot of great things to talk about with data and the future and how society will change with technology. But this is a time in history where we're seeing a societal shift. But we got to make sense of it. >> Yeah, you know, John, I'm going to try and keep it together as well. I think this is my seventh time in Vegas this year. And I'm sure every time I've spent at least some time in Mandalay Bay. This event, you know, I had a personal tragedy in my own life of losing my nephew to gun violence. We're all scratching for answers and trying to find a solution to this. And I'm a little bit ... It's a tough moment I think, personally, for us and our friends in the community. But the folks here at NetApp have done a really great job. Not just NetApp but the community in general, here in Las Vegas there's been folks in the community that have organized blood drives. The Red Cross has actually asked us to stop donating blood because of the outpouring of support. And I think that focus of hope in changing the world is what I would like to focus on. >> Well, I mean, take a company like NetApp having their annual customer event, partner event here at Mandalay Bay. It's their big event. And on their doorstep this happens. How they've handled themselves, I think, shows the culture of NetApp. They respect, they took pause. They canceled the first day. They handled it with extreme class. George Kurian put out there a personal story. But this is what it's about. We've got to move on. But I think to me, it's not about politics. It's not about any of that. It's about how do we move forward? And I hate to use a cliché, it's a wake up call. The world has changed in an instant through a prism of a known life. We heard that at 9/11. It's been 16 years. Enough's enough. And here's the deal, we have to be awake. We are realizing that, not the digital transformation for the enterprise, it is a transformation around the world. If you look at geopolitics, or you look at what's happened even today in the news. Even though the President of the United States is here to visit with the families, the Senate Intelligence Committee points out more fake news influenced via social media on Facebook with the Russians hacking the election. They didn't really hack the election, they just used advertising and albatross Facebook among other platforms to manipulate the election. Equifax hack, turns out as I reported originally on theCUBE, it was a state-sponsored activity, it was not a hack. These are new realities. And this is the theme that we see at theCUBE across our events that we go to, the new reality that we are living in a completely different society and it's on us to lean in and be part of the solution. And it's not about being a political solution or saying, "Hey, I'm praying." I mean, we're praying. But you can pray. Praying is what you do, action is another. But it's not about just the gun laws or this or that, it's about the society and the communities. The GoFundMe's are going crazy for the victims, but you can't replace the mother. We had a loss in our community, former Cisco employee lost her life, three kids. The communities have to lean in, individuals have to lean in if they have expertise. I think this is going to be a call to arms that's going to have a revolutionary effect on people. And I think it's an opportunity for the technology industry to lean in, use what we know. We have AI. We got blockchain. We got machine-learning. And this data, the slogan of NetApp couldn't be more perfect. Changing the world with data this is the mandate. >> So, George Kurian gave an ardent, and just compassionate... I had a tough time keeping myself together at the end of yesterday's keynote. George shared how data helped save his son's life. His 13-year-old son comes home every day thankful for technology. And we need to find ways to use AI, use machine learning to impact our communities. While we're talking about the larger, global community, even in my hometown of Chicago that's ravished by violence. You know, there's ways to use social media, data, AI-driven changes to help create policies and to help enable community organizers to understand the source of this nonsense basically. We say this is the new normal, but we should never grow numb to it. >> And I'm grateful -- >> John: No, it's not normal. It's not normal. And this is why I tell my daughter who's the class president of junior high school, Paolo Alto High School, this is not normal. This is not normal. This is not what we want. >> Keith: No! >> You know, you're personal tragedy, hit home with you personally. You had to rationalize it. And you're also a very active participant in the community. This is a new opportunity. The new normal is to behave differently, not the outcome. How do you look at that? Given what you've been through personally and now this, it brings together emotions but then the logic has to kick in. >> Keith: Right. >> You have to execute, actually take action. >> So, it started again Monday when a bunch of us had to make the decision on whether or not we're going to make the trip to Vegas to participate in a enterprise IT show. Your initial gut reaction is, "You know what, so many dead. What does it really matter to go to a conference at this point in time?" And then, you start to rationalize. "You know what? My way of life, our way of life cannot change. We can't allow this tragic event to change how we approach it." And again, NetApp and George did a great job of kicking off the conversation saying that we need to use this as a pivot point to drive the conversation to how us technologists can leverage this. >> Let's take this to where NetApp's living right now. NetApp Insight 2017 is the even we're kicking off here, all day coverage, here on theCUBE with Keith Townsend, expert in the field. Cloud, data, storage, it's all converging. But the reality is is that NetApp has SolidFire. They've bought great company. You're seeing a DNA transfer off of the original DNA of NetApp which has been very innovative culture. They have a very big success story as a start up, went public, and now are continuing to transform. Their customers are transforming but you bring up this new normal that the behavior we want to change and the outcomes that will become of it, speaks to the culture of what we're seeing in the enterprise transformation. A new class of developers are coming in. And the class of developers are about DevOps, their about infrastructure as code. And these new developers, have a new mindset. >> Yeah, so NetApp, a storage company, right? They store bits, retrieve bits. Not so much. They spent a hour on stage yesterday, even before they talked about any products, any architectures, talking about the value of data. Data is the ... And John, you've talked about data for as long as I've known you. Data is the number one asset of any company and NetApp focused not on storage, not on arrays, not on how fast the speeds and feeds go, but the value of data and extracting that value from your subsystems and then going into the conversation around how NetApp can assist in that journey in leveraging data. >> Okay, we're going to kickoff Day One coverage with NetApp Insight 2017 here on theCUBE. Changing the world with data. That is the focus, that is the conversation. And that is an aperture, that's the entire world from how you store the data, how to use the data. How do you to put it to work? How do you create value and transformation? This is theCUBE bringing the action here from the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas for NetApp Insight 2017. Stay with us. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. (upbeat techno music)